What’s the Deal With
All This Random Photography?

 

When I was in college – and, to be really honest, pretty much all the way up to today – one of my favorite songs has been Bob Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello.” The first few lines are:

If you see her, say hello
She might be in Tangiers
She left here last early Spring
Been living there, I hear

 

In those days, I was living with my widowed father in Spain on his last foreign assignment with the CIA.  And I had this little fantasy going on that I would eventually be an in-demand NatGeo photog, living in a stone cottage filled with red geraniums, high in the Pyrenees. I would be so remote that my devoted NatGeo photo editor would have to take a donkey the last five steep-sloped miles from the train station, to hand me my next assignment. Maybe to Tangiers?

Never made it to Tangiers. And these days I think I’ll pass. Instead, I live in a small adobe cottage just at the foothills of the Southern Rockies.  No geraniums – I kill plants. No donkeys necessary. (I can be easily found online or on my Iphone.) But I do have a blind cat, named PD, indoors. Outdoors, there a family of bobcats who like to stop by my mother’s old roasting pan, which I keep filled with water for the wildlife.

 

 

(And I do have a wonderful editor, whom I’m devoted to. When we met, he was living in Australia where he was editing my book manuscript while coming down from painkillers he was using after he broke his back in a skiing accident. Last I heard, though, he had temporarily moved to Bulgaria where he wears tuxedos at cocktail parties held in nearby castles. He has a way of making interesting friends quickly.)

I love the idea that when anyone wonders where I might be found in the world at any given time, the automatic answer is, “It’s anybody’s guess,” or “Beats the hell out of me.” (Although, truth be told, I have a friend who works for Doctors Without Borders, and she really could be in Tangiers at any given time. At the moment she’s in Haiti at a burn hospital there.  Before that she was in Erbil, Iraq. She’s living my dream. Only she never takes pictures.  She’s been busy.)

My life is a toggle switch.  Position A has me at my home office, in my little cottage in the high desert, banging away at a book manuscript or a client’s platform-building campaign. Position B has PD and me on the road headed somewhere.  When my blue Volvo convertible is not parked out front in my driveway, that’s a sign. I haven’t gone to the movies.  I’ve gone to Idaho.

 

 

Which brings us back to the matter of the photographs on this website.

The convention these days is to fill business-related websites with stock images of people shaking hands, doing group hugs and high-fives, and overhead views of hipster desk tops with the ubiquitous black-keyed MacBook Airs, coffee mugs, a notebook, and maybe a vase of flowers.  Do you really need to see another collection of those? (Plus, let me just say that my coffee mugs could use a date with baking soda.)

 

There’s really not much to show in a writer’s life. All the action is between the ears. And, believe me, you really don’t want to see that.

But still, I know, every website needs a touch of eye candy to break up the blah blah blah. So I bring you snapshots from Position B of my life’s toggle switch – delights and sights from my life the road.

Which isn’t to say that you won’t see commercially produced royalty-free stuff now and then. They’re handy for illustrating blog posts.  But really, wouldn’t you rather see a basket of peaches from a Washington State farm stand just east of the Cascades?  Or the crisp folded rhythms of a Bismark palm in a West Palm Beach garden?

So don’t try to make any sense of the pictures you see here. For the most part, they’re just there for the pretty.